UC Women Faculty Artists Prove Their Worth

The disparaging dictum that “Those who can’t do, teach” might be mumbled in a few corners of UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery this month, but abundant evidence to the contrary ought to silence most such snide remarks.

“Diversity and Presence: Women Faculty Artists of the University of California,” like the UC faculty exhibition that preceded it at the gallery, demonstrates that artistic integrity and academic commitment are not mutually exclusive.

The show, which was organized by Katherine Diage, director of the University Art Museum at UC Riverside, and runs through June 19, features 22 women artists teaching in the UC system and intends to call attention to the tremendous resource they constitute.

Diage notes in the accompanying catalogue that women now represent roughly a quarter of all faculty artists in the UC system, contrasted with a meager 7% in the early 1960s. This passing mention is the only reference to the show’s spirit of affirmative action.

In the work itself, sex plays no consistent role, as even the women who work with such stereotypically feminine materials as fabric and fibers, and such subjects as domestic life and sexual identity, now have prominent male counterparts with similar concerns.

The wealth of ideas generated by the artists in the show stretches from the formal to the political, and even the few contributors trapped by technique have a place within this range of resources.

For example, Kathleen Bick of UCLA capitalizes on our fascination with high technology in her ink jet prints made from computer-scanned photographs, but little depth lies beyond their finely dotted surfaces.

Kathryn Metz (UC Santa Cruz) updates but downgrades the technique of pointilism in her Italian landscapes, and Victoria Rivers (UC Davis) indulges in coy decoration with her “Hot Pepper Vines,” a glowing tangle of black-light neon tubing and plexiglass.

The show wanders only briefly on such shaky terrain, however, keeping to solid ground and work of substantive content for most of the way.

Barbara Drucker’s (UCLA) provocative “Four Sisters” invites the viewer to sit in a narrow chamber within a minimal plywood and Masonite cell. A sliver of light from above the sole chair provides scant illumination, just enough to define the purity of the space, with its clean lines and unfinished wood surfaces.

Although the room’s confining scale might tempt claustrophobia, it prompts meditation instead. Rather than encasing the participant in an institutional, threatening anonymity, the handmade walls and chair protect her with a peaceful, comforting simplicity.

Two large works by Squeak Carnwath (UC Davis) employ a pictographic simplicity to pose questions of time, identity and passage. In “Before,” Carnwath alludes to the biblical fall from innocence through the juxtaposition of a woman, a snake and a tree. Additional symbols--a spiral, a house, a plate of fish--and space filled only by a swarm of fingerprinted smudges give the image a quality of primal but cryptic expression.

“Door,” composed of six abutting canvases, similarly combines the universal and the personal. The snake and silhouetted house appear again, next to scenes with figures--a couple dancing or embracing, a woman greeting another, or perhaps her own reflection--that identify the work as an individual and collective diary.

Although Carnwath’s combinations of signs defy an obvious narrative decoding, the images cling together in the imagination with a sure, primitive power.

Painter Patricia Wickman (UCLA) also seduces with a style of straightforward clarity that yields unclear, obscured meanings. Like frames lifted from a surreal film, Wickman’s predominantly black and white scenes join autonomous, disparate figures in common domestic spaces.

A psychological weight bears down on them as they move about silently in these dark interiors. In “The Underbelly,” a nude woman appears to run a deep red cloth through a sewing machine while a man, also nude, fits the same cloth around a mattress like a sheet. Next to him stands a young girl playing a toy keyboard with a distant, blank stare.

As in the paintings of Eric Fischl, the incongruity and violated intimacy of the family scene charges Wickman’s work with an atmosphere of tension and doubt. Her dramatic lighting of the figures and her accenting of selected objects in red and gold heighten the oddity of the scenes and confuse their position with regard to reality.

Excerpts from extensive projects by UCSD Professors Eleanor Antin and Helen Harrison offer a taste of two lives wholly intertwined with their art.

In Antin’s “The Angel of Mercy,” represented here by an installation and a videotaped performance, the artist nuzzles her way into a historical context until she appears to belong there, but leaves plenty of visible tracks to remind us of the ploy.

Antin’s persuasive powers peak in a series of photographs uncannily reminiscent of 19th-Century war reportage. Here, and, in the performance, Antin assumes the role of a Victorian woman with an irrepressible “moral nature,” who leaves her aristocratic family to nurse the wounded in the Crimean War.

On the front, “Eleanor Nightingale” encounters class struggle as she observes just who is profiting from the war and who is suffering. Timeless issues of personal identity and social justice meander through the work, hand in hand with parody and a wonderfully self-conscious theatricality.

“Sea Grant,” from Helen and Newton Harrison’s “Book of the Seven Lagoons,” merges scientific research with philosophical, sociological and ecological inquiry, and presents the data in the form of prose, accompanied by diagrams and tinted photographs.

The Harrisons’ sensitivity to the most fundamental humanistic and environmental concerns makes them, along with many other artists in the show, valuable resources not only of the university system, but of our global community as well.